In the final episode of the season, Susan Mathews speaks with Antone Martinho-Truswell, a fascinating behavioural ecologist, Operations Manager at the Sydney Policy Lab, and Research Associate at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. His Substack is called The Village Green and he is author of The Parrot in the Mirror: How evolving to be like birds made us human (2022). The book, and this episode, considers the parallels between the 'evolutionary grooves' of the extremely advantageous traits of humans and birds—the former, by becoming the cultural ape, and the latter through flight.

Antone explains how one trait that is advantageous leads to a number of adaptations that support it. For example, how human babies are born underdeveloped, and humans have cultures that care for children for a long time in order to support the big brain that we need to grow. Taking us through the evolution of birds, Antone describes how, in dinosaurs like T-Rex, small raptors and Archaeopteryx, scales evolved into feathers which smaller dinosaurs probably began to take advantage of with glides and long leaps. And, over time, the bodies of these creatures became entirely specialised for flight.

They spoke about relative lifespans. Birds live two to ten times as long as mammals of a similar size. The reason is flight. The most obvious advantage is that it's much easier to escape predators, but birds live longer even when there are no predators around. This is because of K-selection and r-selection. K-selection is a live-slow-die-old strategy, and r-selection a live-fast-die-young strategy. An adaptation like flight starts a virtuous cycle where, since it is much more likely that a bird makes it to the next breeding season, evolution selects traits that enable it to live longer.

Movement itself, Antone stresses, is a pretty impressive biological feat. While microorganisms and water-dwelling creatures like coral are bathed in the medium that sustains its life, and plants are rooted in a life-sustaining substrate, wrapping all of the incredibly complex chemical reactions of life in a waterproof bag like a dog or a human is incredible. And then adding the third dimension of flight is a difficult feat because the animal has to fight gravity itself. The evolutionary advantage is huge because it's rare, and it's rare because it's hard to do.

But such a drastic advantage can also have other implications. Antone's article Empire of Flight in Aeon, considers why, even though birds have a lot of the same raw materials for a robust and complex culture—intelligence, communication, long overlapping lives, knowledge passed down through the generations—they have not developed one. Evolution never aspires to anything, only responds to inadequacy, and so, he hypotheses, birds don't need culture because flight is such a powerful adaptation. The more advantageous the adaptation, the less likely it is that a different way of life evolves.

Similarly, in humans, while there are some incremental changes to our genes, our complex culture, with its welfare, science, and other innovations, has taken away the pressure to do things differently. Even if there is an apocalyptic event that takes away all of our technology, we're still going to have all of the abstract components—like writing and money—that give us significant advantages. But just as this capacity lets us build concepts like democracy, it also enables us to build complex concepts like 'enemies' and 'hate' in ways that few other creatures can.

Finally, while narrow sustainability—energy consumption, resource use—is important, Antone persuades us to think of broader sustainability. We need to consider the physical space and the resources that we and our cities use, and, rather than fencing in nature, find ways to live that are continuous with the rest of nature.

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.

More about the guest:

Antone Martinho-Truswell's work focuses on animal minds and learning, and on human behaviour and interaction with the natural world. He is particularly interested in birds and cephalopods, intelligent species whose evolutionary history differs dramatically from that of mammals. His academic work has been published in Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Current Biology and Animal Behaviour and covered in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times and New Scientist, among others. He also writes on longstanding questions in biology and animal behaviour for Aeon and the BBC. You can find him on Instagram @stjosephwoodworks.

In episode four of The Subverse, host Susan Mathews talks with Joaquin Ezcurra, an intrepid and adventurous cartographer, marine technician and web developer. Since 2017, Joaquin has been actively involved in Aerocene, an open-source, experimental practice and movement for eco-social justice founded by artist Tomás Saraceno and carried forward by a growing global community since 2015. Aerocene uses art, site-specific installations and augmented reality sculptures to promote climate change awareness. Joaquin has been involved in its aero-solar flight operations, digital strategies, website development, app development, communications, acts as a community liaison, and documents the movement through thousands of images and videos.

Air and the atmosphere, Joaquin reminds us, are the ultimate commons. As Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, famously said, we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. But today, the air is highly controlled, for political, military and commercial reasons. Aerocene imagines a utopia, allowing us to dream of a world in which we may take more time and a more winding route to reach our destination; and our destinations themselves may change. Over the last decade, Aerocene has had projects on six continents, 37 countries and 158 locations, and a total 218 flights. It has evolved from an art and science project to an art and activism project.

Joaquin emphasised however, that the story of the movement is not only one of triumphs but failures and learning. The need for safety came into focus early when, while piloting an experimental flight, Tomás Saraceno fell from a significant height, sustaining injuries that required surgery. Since then, the Aerocene community has embraced the highest aeronautical safety protocols and only involves professional balloon pilots for aerosolar free-flights.

A milestone for the Aerocene movement was the 2020 flight of the Aerocene Pacha. A team comprised of Argentine and foreign pilots, the indigenous communities of the Salinas Grandes fighting for their rights, and BTS fans, in the middle of the salt flats of Argentina were witness to a flight that broke 32 FAI world records for altitude and distance. The flight was piloted by Leticia Marqués, a kindergarten teacher turned professional balloon pilot. It was livestreamed around the world, carrying a message chosen by the local First Nation communities: 'water and life are worth more than lithium'. It was, as Joaquin describes, a sight never seen; a compelling intersection of science, art, activism and music communities coming together.

We then discussed the issues with the 'green transition', which is a shift to electric vehicles in Europe and other countries in the guise of environmental concerns. However, the mining of lithium, which is fuelling this shift, is destructive, and needs extractive infrastructure so vast that one can only comprehend it from a plane or a satellite. It is destroying the salt flats of Argentina, a crucial wetland that serves as a migratory hub for birds in the Americas. In 2023, the Aerocene community gathered in Alfarcito, Argentina, where some of the country's top environmentalist, sociologist lawyers, philosophers, artists, writers and poets issued a declaration based on the idea of the rights of nature for the Salinas Grandes in Alfarcito. This hasn't stopped mining companies, but these efforts have stood along these communities and slowed the advance of mining in this region.

Geopolitics has long been rooted in land ownership, projected upward into the air, and down into the earth. But the atmosphere is more than a void above the land. Recognizing the rights of air means acknowledging its agency in sustaining life. We need to move away from this colonial capitalist view and increase the connections in our lives. Aerocene's Museo Aero Solar, a free and open source project, to build a living museum with nothing more than a few thousand plastic bags and many volunteers, is the perfect tool for this. It brings people together and reminds us that when you have this strong, local connections, as Joaquin says, magic happens.

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.

Read more about Aerocene in our interview with Claudia Aboaf, a writer, teacher and astrologer who has worked closely with the collective.

More about the guest:

Joaquín Ezcurra is a cartographer, artist, and researcher whose practice explores alternative ways of seeing and representing natural phenomena, combining science with sensitivity in the context of the climate emergency. He has collaborated with leading cultural and scientific institutions worldwide, and since 2017 has been a core collaborator with the Aerocene Foundation and the worldwide Aerocene community.

In episode three, Susan Mathews continues her conversation with Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024). Mădălina works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Please listen to the first part of this conversation in episode two to hear about the need for a holistic view of our immersion in the atmosphere, thermic auras, and multisensory perception as the basis for empathy.

Our conversation began with tornadoes, their radical dynamic form that makes air visible and creates a figure that is both perfect and dangerous, an ambivalence which diverges from the classical experience of beauty as harmony. There are other figures of the sky like clouds, lightning and the rainbow, but Mădălina was drawn to the tornado's uncontrolled genesis and evolution as it challenges the assumption of the Anthropocene that humans can manipulate and domesticate everything.

She spoke of the limitations of equating materiality with solid matter. Water and air are also material, as are light and other electromagnetic waves, radiation and other phenomena. Mădălina invites a shift not just of how matter is conceptualized, but of the traditional representation of matter as something passive that can be manipulated by humans to instead recognise that we are not the only form of matter who can be assigned activity or agency.

The conversation then moved on to an interrogation of the human fixation on landscapes. Mădălina introduced the concept of landscapability to capture our tendency to compose, through analogy, a landscape even when land may not be present, say on the Arctic ocean as we are surrounded by air, water and ice. She also highlighted the values conveyed within our definition of landscapes, including emotional value such as patriotism, of topophilia. This theory of landscapes is also contextually informed by its origins in landscape painting in Italy and central Europe—a theory emerging from a different culture would not have the same principles. For example, one formed in the Amazonian forests would not have the particular principle of panoramic views.

Mădălina's study also includes work on the tactile aesthetics of cityscapes. A city is full of microclimates. On a hot summer day, you can enter a building and experience shadows and, in the last century, air conditioning. A glass houses can cultivate tomatoes earlier than the climate outside allows. This lack of a monotonous thermic landscape is a performance of civilization but so is paradoxically the creation of blandscapes such as shopping malls. The question of how to cope with and mitigate the consequences of climate change is not only for philosophers, but for architects and urban planners. The solution is not to build more capsules for a select group who can afford them; we need to develop strategies of common survival.

Finally, we discussed the idea of traces. Mădălina spoke of how a trace is a kind of material signature left by someone or by something. They are not ruins but remainders. Traces are present, while also suggesting an absence. Some traces are more enduring than a life itself. Waste is also a trace, though an unwanted one. Some of these waste traces are incontrollable and some, like radioactive waste, are indestructible.

Mădălina closes by urging us to pay attention to the things that surround us in everyday life, all worthy of our time and attention, that could open the doors of our perception to truly atmospheric living.

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.

More about the guest:

Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.

In episode two, Susan Mathews speaks to Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024) who works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception.

Re-defining aesthetics to mean not just beauty but perception, Mădălina spoke of weather not just as a frontal experience, but our immersion in the atmosphere, the very medium of our life and existence as it permeates our porous bodies and sensitivities. We experience it not as thinking subjects, but as living beings. While it is, in principle, a commons that is available to all, its perception and access is socially, culturally, politically conditioned. Aesthetic perception converges with scientific knowledge within the ethical consideration—we simply cannot enjoy a natural catastrophe. There is a communication of vessels between our moral and our aesthetic being.

She spoke of how imagination throws us into the past, but we can also project ourselves into the future. And this is what at least some environmentally committed artists do, as they imagine the earth after the collapse of civilization, a paradoxical posthumous imagination.

Mădălina shared her long fascination with what were philosophically known as the 'lower senses', including olfaction, and the need to go beyond Western philosophical frameworks. Smells are extremely evocative. The sense of temperature, usually subsumed in tactility which is a vast spectrum of perception in itself, deserves a separate theory. While sight has just two sensory organs, with temperature, we have the whole body, its surface and its depths. And the thermic 'aura' of every living being extends beyond the boundary of the thermic subject. We then spoke of Herman Schmitz's concept of the body's tendencies to narrow and to expand, the epicritic and the protopathic, in breathing, in response to pain.

Mădălina brought to focus the tendency to subordinate the richness of perception of our everyday life and of art to a merely ocular experience. But in reality, we experience, say architecture, not merely as visual but also thermic, clothing also as tactile, perfumes not merely as olfactory but evoking a feeling, say of refreshment. And this goes deeper with performing arts such as dance where, as spectators, the tendency to focus on the visuals, leads to a deficit of empathy and a disregard for other aspects of the dancer's experience such as heat and pain. In visual arts and fine arts, thermic considerations could destroy the art itself, or be used by the artist to form or deform materials. As Mădălina said, we need to expand our traditional aesthetic concepts to account for this richness of experience.

Join us with your thermic body and enjoy the fleecy, cloudy edges of our conversation. This is part one of the conversation. Listen to part two in episode three to hear our conversation about tornadoes, traces and landscapes.

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.

More about the guest:

Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.

We kick off season five of The Subverse, focused on the element of 'air', with host Susan Mathews in conversation with Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India. Roxy has made breakthrough contributions to the research, monitoring, and modelling of climate and extreme weather events over the Indo-Pacific region. His work has advanced the scientific understanding of monsoon floods and droughts, terrestrial and marine heatwaves, and cyclones, facilitating the food, water, and economic security of the region. His recent research focuses on developing climate-smart health warning systems that integrate climate and health data with AI/ML to enable early action and long-term planning. Roxy actively collaborates with citizen science networks, local governments, and media to bring science to society.

Roxy starts by explaining that the average atmospheric temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.5 degrees doesn't tell the whole story. 93% of the heat produced by anthropogenic climate change is absorbed and contained by the oceans; the heat we feel is only 7% of it. Even this is also not equally distributed over time or space. The tropics, and regions like India which are surrounded by warming oceans, experience more heat. The changes in gradients in the temperature affects the paths of atmospheric jet streams and ocean currents that distribute heat, which changes the rhythm of the seasons, intensifying monsoons and increasing heat waves. The Indian Ocean, bordered by 40 countries that are home to a third of the global population, is warming faster than other oceans and moving to a near permanent marine heat wave state. Corals, on which 25% of the marine biodiversity depends, are the first to die in these heatwaves, losing their protective symbiotic algae. And this affects the numbers and species of phytoplankton, which produce half the oxygen we breath, and there are cascading impacts through the food chain.

He emphasises, however, that climate change is not the only factor in these changes. Industrial fishing has resulted in more depletion of fish than temperature changes. Flooding in India is caused not just by climate change but also rapid and unplanned urbanization and other local changes, but politicians will only blame the former. In the USA, they don't focus on climate change because they have a historical responsibility. The world is polarized and the narratives around climate change are selective based on alliances, but we need to have a comprehensive view.

There is hope, Roxy says. If we can use the data that we have to understand the heat waves over the land and ocean, we can adapt and safeguard the ecosystems and our own lives. If we act now, we can have different socioeconomic pathways for the future. Data is key to making these changes. Roxy's pet project is to make every school in India a weather station, starting with tools as simple as a plastic bottle to measure rainfall, because if children grow up with an awareness of how the climate is changing, they can adapt.

While a lot of the focus is on climate mitigation, this is outside the scope of the individual, or even a single country, and the necessary global cooperation doesn't exist. Roxy reminds us, however, that adaptation is something that can and needs to be done locally. We can track local data, project this data into the future, and prepare our homes, farmlands, and our daily life for a climate changed world. Roxy is that unusual blend of rigorous scientist and amazing science communicator, who speaks with empathy, heart and an outlook prioritizing action and deeds.

This conversation was also proof of something I have found in this elemental journey in the past few years. Quoting John Muir, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.

More about the guest:

Roxy Koll did his Ph.D. in Ocean and Atmospheric Dynamics from Hokkaido University, Japan. He is a Lead Author of the IPCC Reports and the former Chair of the Indian Ocean Region Panel. He received the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (National Science Award), the highest recognition in the field of science, technology and innovation in India, from the President of India in 2024. He was conferred a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and was awarded the AGU Devendra Lal Medal for outstanding research in Earth and Space Sciences in 2022. He is among the top 2% scientists ranked by Stanford University. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Kavli Fellowship in 2015 and the NRC Senior Research Fellowship in 2018. The Indian Meteorological Society felicitated him with the Young Scientist Award in 2016 for his research on the changes in the Monsoon.

You can follow Roxy on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read more about his work here.

In episode three of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with writer, academic and documentary producer, Sami Ahmad Khan.

He is the author of Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia (2012), Aliens in Delhi (2017), and the monograph Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021).

Sami was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and his fiction has been the subject of formal academic research and a part of university syllabi in India and the US. His overview of Indian SF has been translated into Czech and his short story has been translated into Marathi. His creative and critical writings have appeared in leading academic journals (Science Fiction Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Foundation), university presses (MIT Press, University of Wales Press), and trade imprints (Gollancz, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Rupa, Juggernaut, Niyogi).

Sami is also the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship (University of Oslo, Norway), a Fulbright FLTA grant (University of Iowa, USA), and a UGC-MANF Senior Research Fellowship (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India). He currently discusses life and Science Fiction at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, where he teaches MA and PhD-level courses on SF, as well as supervises PhD research on Indian SF.

In this episode, we discuss our love for pulpy science fiction, T-rexes, Black holes, and the Bermuda triangle, thought experiments, being a fan, genre conventions, and the future of Indian science fiction.

You can follow Sami on X @SamiAhmadKhan

Read Sami's Work:

Books

1. Aliens in Delhi. Niyogi Books (2017)

2. Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia. Rupa & Co. (2012)

3. Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction. University of Wales Press (2021)

Edited Collection:

1. The Speculative Route: Futures from South and Southwest Asia and North Africa. Routledge (2025, co-edited with Merve Tabur)

Short fiction:

1. "Ancient Zombies: Six Indian Narratives of the Undead". Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature. Jan-Feb. 2024.

2. "Biryani Bagh", The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction II. Hachette (2021)

3. "15004", The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction. Gollancz (2019)

4. "PT Period", Muse India (2016)

Podcast:

1. The NeoMONSTERS Podcast

Academic articles:

1. "Zombies and India: The neoMONSTERS Epidemiology". The Journal of Popular Culture, 56(2). 341-355. (2023)

2. "Dom(e)inating India's Tomorrow(s)? Global Climate Change in Select Anglophonic Narratives". Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. 6(2). 25-37 (2019)

3. "The Others in India's Other Futures," Science Fiction Studies. 43(3), Indian SF. 479-495 (2016)

4. "Gods of War Toke While Riding a Vimana: Hindu Gods in Three Indian Science Fiction Novels." Journal of Science Fiction. 1(1) 17-31 (2016)

5. "Control+Alt+Delete Humanity" Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. Ed. By Yoshinaga, Guynes and Canavan. MIT Press (2022)

In this final instalment of Cataplisms, we join conservation anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan and his collaborator Iho Mitapo in the Dibang Valley on a journey that is both spiritual and scientific. Iho and Sahil are founding members of the Dibang Team, a biocultural conservation initiative led by the Idu Mishmi, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dibang valley, that takes a multi-pronged and multi-disciplinary approach. It has established an ancestral storytelling program (Taju Taye), piloted a program that adapts the traditional system of shamanic learning to present-day socio-economic realities (Igu Aahito) and pioneered community-led conservation and research.

In this audio story, Iho details the creation story of his Idu Mishmi community, one which deems man and tiger to be brothers. Meanwhile, Sahil fills us in on their camera-trapping expedition that resulted in a sensational deep-forest revelation. His team discovered a unique adaptation that might be critical to the survival of the elusive Asian golden cat, a beautiful mid-sized feline listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Click here to see their discovery vibrantly illustrated in a comic by artist Sudarshan Shaw.

Sahil and Iho's research takes place in the sprawling Dibang valley in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The valley lies in the embrace of the Eastern Himalayas Global Biodiversity Hotspot, where new species, like the orchid Hemipilia basifoliata are continuously being discovered. The culture of the Idu Mishmi is credited for preserving the diversity of this land. However, today the Valley is threatened by infrastructure projects, including 17 mega dams proposed along the valley's eponymous river. Local and national opinion on these projects is divided, but one thing is certain—if these are greenlit the social, cultural and ecological fabric of the region will be irreversibly changed. With such looming threats to their habitat, the fate of the Golden Cat and myriad other species remains uncertain.

You can learn more about the work of the Dibang Team on their website and read about the Save Dibang Valley movement here.

The audio story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website.

About the narrators:

Iho Mitapo is an Idu Mishmi from Lower Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh. He has been conducting research on Dibang Valley's biocultural diversity since 2014 in collaboration with anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan. Iho is the first certified river guide from the Idu community. In 2017, he founded a home-grown ecotourism venture, Dibang Adventures, with the aim of preserving Dibang's unique landscape while engaging unemployed local youth. He is a member of the Dibang Team, an Idu-led biocultural conservation initiative. He also co-coordinates the activities of Elopa-Etugu Community Eco-Cultural Preserve (EECEP)—a Community Conserved Area spanning 76 km2 in his ancestral land, one of the most biodiverse parts of India. Iho was awarded the prestigious Sanctuary Wildlife Service Award in 2018 for his tireless work and contribution towards the conservation of his homeland. He has delivered talks at several national and international fora and has inspired films and articles on Dibang Valley's story. He is also a farmer and a father of two wonderfully curious young Idus.

Sahil Nijhawan is engineer turned conservation anthropologist. For more than a decade, he has conducted interdisciplinary research in Latin America, Southern Africa and India. He is interested in human-wildlife relations, big cat ecology and conservation, camera trapping methods, indigenous/local concepts of nature, animism and shamanism, hunting sustainability, ritual ecologies, and locally-led conservation. His ongoing research and collaborative conservation work in Northeast India began with his doctoral research which studied the ecological, cultural and political relations between wildlife and the Idu Mishmi people of the Dibang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Future work will expand research into other ethnic communities within Northeast India to understand the factors that lead to local conservation. He is particularly interested in newer ways of integrating cutting edge technologies with local knowledge and classical ethnographic approaches, research capacity building in NE India and collaborating with local people, artists and educators towards inclusive, ethical and reflexive approaches to conservation research and writing. Sahil is affiliated with ZSL, National Geographic Society, UCL Anthropology, and the ICCA Consortium. He enjoys travelling, learning languages, baking and growing his own food.

In episode three, we chat with Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna, and R.T. Samuel, the brilliant minds behind The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which has been making waves in the Indian speculative fiction scene.

Rashmi Devadasan is a writer with over twenty-five years of experience in indie publishing, Tamil feature films, and Indian English theatre. At Blaft, she has been part of the selection, editing, design and production of the company's fiction in translation, comic book anthologies, original fiction, and zines. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a picture book created with the artist Shyam. Her short stories were part of an anthology titled Strange Worlds! Strange Times! Amazing Sci-Fi Stories, published by Speaking Tiger. She is a fan of fungi, moss, lichen, cephalopods, and jellyfish. Rashmi also draws gentle, mostly cuboidal-shaped sample collector robots that do research on a cacti-covered asteroid. You can find Rashmi Devadasan on Instagram @kaimaurundai.

Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, who is also his wife, in 2008. The company publishes translations of Indian fiction, folklore, weird fiction, and graphic novels. Rakesh is the co-author of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India, the editor of Blaft's Tamil Pulp Fiction and Gujarati Pulp Fiction anthologies, and co-editor of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF. Sometimes he edits mathematics textbooks. He is interested in marine invertebrates, demonology, topological graph theory, and banging on things to see what they sound like. You can find Rakesh Khanna on Instagram @blaftpublications.

R.T. Samuel is an editor and independent cultural producer working between London and New Delhi. R is the co-editor of the collection, The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, helmed by a viral fundraiser that made it the second-most successful Indian publishing campaign in Kickstarter history. The book involved working with nearly 30 authors, translators and artists for close to two years, and features stories from more than six different languages and diverse mediums. From 2021-23, R was also the writer and broadcaster behind the hugely popular (20k plays and counting) underground political and cultural education podcast Clear Blue Skies S1. A lapsed investigative and culture journalist, R is currently pursuing an MSc in Anthropology and Professional Practice at University College London and is always happy to talk about 80s SFF, public radio, futures literacy and Indian hip-hop. You can find R.T. Samuel on Instagram @mithran.rt.

In this episode, we discuss the lack of understanding around caste, what's missing from the Indian SFF scene, the challenges and thrills of putting together an expansive anthology, the importance of translated fiction, Enid Blyton's undeniable influence, and more.

Links to Rashmi Devadasan's work:

• Kumari Loves A Monster

Links to Rakesh Khanna's work:

• Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India – Blaft Publications

• The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF – Blaft Publications

• The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction – Blaft Publications

Links to R.T. Samuel's work:

• I Know My Own Animal Heart on Third Eye (Essay)

• As Long As The Image Lasts: Shaping Memory & Making Imprints At Peers '23 (Essay)

In episode two of season four, lawyer, author, and editor Gautam Bhatia returns!

When we last spoke to Gautam, he had just published The Horizon, the much-anticipated sequel to The Wall. Since then, he's published a variety of non-fiction books, helped curate and edit a new anthology, Between Worlds, for Westland Books, and published a new sci-fi novel: The Sentence.

The Sentence is genre crossing, with elements of political thrillers, murder mysteries, and old school science fiction. In it, the protagonist, Nila, is faced with an ethical, legal and political conundrum which will change the world as she knows it.

In this episode, we discuss the Indian science fiction landscape, Japanese-style murder mysteries, being fallible humans, the death penalty and carceral justice, and the big fat desi space opera.

You can follow Gautam on X @gautambhatia88

Read Gautam's Work:

The Sentence (2024)

The Wall (2020)

The Horizon (2022)

Between Worlds (2025)

In the first episode of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with Gigi Ganguly, to discuss her debut collection of short stories, Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World (Westland Books, 2024).

Gigi began her career as a journalist and, after some years of writing for newspapers, she decided to study creative writing at the University of Limerick. Her first novella, One Arm Shorter than the Other, published in 2022, got her nominated for the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award in 2023.

Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World focuses on the relationship between the human and more-than-human in a fascinating, speculative way. A man herds clouds, a powerhouse singer conjures rain, a scientist piggybacks on an otter's consciousness, and much more.

In this episode, we discuss the beauty of Steinbeck's writing, the peculiar case of Elon Musk, K-dramas, rain songs, dinosaurs and robots.

You can follow Gigi on X @gigiganguly

Read Gigi's Work:

Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World

One Arm Shorter than the Other